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Strategy reviews

163 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.

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163 reviews

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader

A turn-based CRPG that hands you a voidship, a dynasty's fortune and the Imperium's blessing to do almost anything with both — built on a career system that turns absurd by the final act, and shipped rough enough at launch that its current, patched shape is a genuinely different game to review.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Wasteland 3

Some of the best-written quests and dialogue in any CRPG, wrapped around turn-based combat that knows what it's doing — and six years of bug reports that never quite stopped, concentrated almost entirely in the co-op mode it was sold on.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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X4: Foundations

The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.

7.5 / 10

Reviewed

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Abyss Horde

A four-dollar tower defence roguelite where the towers shoot themselves and you pick the upgrades — and whose players are averaging fourteen hours in its first week. The best value on this list, and the most repetitive thing on it.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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AFK Journey

The best-looking hero-collector on mobile pairs a genuinely thoughtful formation-based combat system with a gacha economy that turns its own leaderboards into the biggest reason to spend.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Banished

A one-person city-building survival game from 2014 that still holds a Very Positive Steam rating across 37,800-plus reviews, built on a genuinely unusual pitch — no money, no skill trees, no combat — that a decade of players keep bumping up against the same mid-game ceiling to enjoy.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Bonereader

A dice-poker deckbuilder set in a shamanic purgatory, reviewed one day after launch on a single professional review, a demo-era user corpus, and Steam's own early data — because the full game itself has exactly one Steam review to its name so far.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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CastleOn

A one-day-old, solo-developed turn-based castle-builder that spent over a year in a public demo before launch — 70-plus buildings, 90-plus technologies and 50-plus historical Crusade-era Lords for a budget price, tested so far by exactly one Steam reviewer.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Colony Survival

A voxel colony-building strategy game crossing Minecraft's block-by-block construction with genuine tower-defense stakes, still in Early Access more than nine years after its 2017 debut — sustained by an unusually transparent weekly developer blog and a loyal Very Positive fanbase, with a persistent, still-current complaint that its mid-to-late game never quite matches the promise of its opening hours.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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CS Manager

A deep, spreadsheet-and-tactics management sim built around Counter-Strike esports — fictional teams and a genuinely detailed match engine, launched a month after a licensed rival and priced above it, with a four-review Steam page too thin to confirm much yet.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Decktamer

A creature-taming roguelike deckbuilder with a genuinely distinctive hook — recruit your enemies into your deck instead of collecting pre-made cards, then lose them permanently if they die in battle — undercut for a meaningful slice of players by steep, RNG-heavy difficulty spikes that a dedicated "Difficulty Update" only partly resolved.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Football Fictional World Simulator

A text-based football world generator where you don't pick a lineup or call a tactic — you only approve or reject the transfers clubs propose, then watch decades of invented history unfold. A genuinely different angle on football management, launched with a five-review Steam page and some sharp early complaints about its own core promise.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Frostpunk 2

11 bit studios' sequel trades the original Frostpunk's intimate, one-building-at-a-time survival for a zoomed-out, district-based political simulation set 30 years later — a deliberate redesign that draws Mostly Positive reception on its own terms, but recurs across a remarkably consistent share of longtime fans as having lost the emotional, personal intimacy that made the original a genre-defining classic.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Infection Free Zone

A zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Manor Lords

A gridless medieval city builder whose household-level burgage plot simulation is the best idea the genre has produced in years, sold on a trailer full of battles it mostly doesn't deliver. Two years and change into Early Access, the honest question isn't whether it's good — it's whether "still becoming" is a fair state to sell it in.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Planetbase

A decade-old space colony sim with a specific, detailed design complaint at the heart of its negative reviews — one terrain quirk that some players call a fatal flaw and others, including a 900-hour veteran, call simple mismanagement.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Rune Dice

A physics-based dice-fusion roguelite that nails its central hook — launching dice across a battlefield to trigger magical merge chains — then shipped with runs so short that the loudest launch complaint was "where's the rest of the game," a criticism the developer answered directly with a free Classic Mode update a month later.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Skyformer

A factory game with one iron deposit. Skyformer caps how fast you can extract anything, so you can't solve problems by building another mine — and then it makes the weather you terraformed into existence come back and destroy your factories. Half a gigabyte, genuinely novel, and rough where it counts.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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Slay the Spire 2

Mega Crit's sequel to one of the most acclaimed deckbuilders ever made adds co-op, two new classes and a rebuilt Ascension ladder, then spends its first five months in Early Access getting hammered by its own veteran players over balance whiplash, a boss nobody could agree on, and a genuine RNG bug a fan had to prove existed.

7 / 10

Reviewed

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